Ken Dixon: NRA cash hits bull's-eye once again

Published 5:20 pm, Friday, April 19, 2013

Want leadership? Want social change? Want safer streets, schools and shopping malls? Well, don't expect any of that to emerge from the partially reclaimed swamps of the District of Columbia.

And don't think for a minute that the Senate last week would have pushed that watered-down "background check" legislation over the finish line if Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman were still haunting the halls of power down there.

That duo of pols is old news, while the simple bill was basically junk, leaving out private sales from criminal background checks. Then the weak bill would head to the U.S. House for a final flushing into the Potomac River.

But the public pressure of Newtown families, their news conferences and high-profile meetings with senators, were easily trumped by the time-honored, closed-door, hand-clutching meetings with National Rifle Association handlers. The NRA applied about $25 million in cash into the recent election cycle, including more than a million bucks in direct contributions to U.S. Senate and House races, according to OpenSecrets.org.

To oppose the status quo, Newtown families are learning, is a multi-year challenge. It's going to take a lot of drives down Interstate 95 to the D.C. ooze; a lot of hotel room showers to rid themselves clean of the platitudes and phony sympathy of millionaire politicians.

It's an issue for the national conscience now, but it will take years to trickle up through the public consciousness. Would the Senate bill have had a better chance if the Boston bombers had used Bushmasters instead of black powder, nails and pressure cookers? Probably. Somewhere, I imagine, an NRA operative was breathing easier last Monday afternoon that AR-15s were not used at the marathon finish line.

Fortunately, in Connecticut, we have about as good a bill as we could hope for, pending the really important future work needed to identify and defuse potentially violent, disturbed people such as Adam Lanza, who killed his mother with a single shot then took two handguns, a shotgun and a Bushmaster XM15 to Sandy Hook Elementary School. There, he shot to death 20 first-graders, six school employees and then himself, with 154 bullets in fives minutes of domestic terror.

I repeat those simple facts for the benefit of several followers of this column who are not exactly the face of responsible gun ownership.

Several of my correspondents are like "John," who thinks mental illness is taking a backseat to the nuts-and-bolts gun issues.

"The governor basically said now with the new law the next Adam Lanza won't be able to kill as many next time. Now, that will do it. Not a peep about the real cause. Just blah blah blah about gun control. It's easier than dealing with the issue of how we are failing in dealing with the Adam Lanzas of the world. There are a bunch of them out there."

That's one of the more articulate, although I have heavily edited his remarks and punctuation.

The most-succinct criticism, in its unexpurgated totality, comes from Glen: "Mr. Dixon, Here is my opinion; you are a dork." I hope he's a responsible gun enthusiast.

Then, there's the lady from Tulsa, Okla., who calls about once a week. She takes umbrage with the list of items seized from the Lanza home that prosecutors released on March 28.

"Wah are you putting the number of knives in the paper?" she asks in that panhandle drawl. "Wah, I'm in my kitchen and I have a whole draw ah knives." She then commences to rattle the drawer. "Heer that? Are mah knives illegal?"

I try to explain the difference between her steak knives and the three Samurai swords with the 28-inch, 21-inch and 13-inch blades; the other knives with the 12-inch, 7.5-inch and 10-inch blades; the six-foot-10-inch wooden pole with a blade on one side and a spear on the other, inventoried from the Lanza home.

I wish she'd stop calling.

But the really dangerous people are those "truthers" who are still out there, sending emails that proclaim the coffins of the Newtown victims were empty when they were buried and that the whole event was staged to further President Obama's anti-gun agenda.

That's just a disgusting example of the depths of division that the gun issue has in this country. So here's a dude named "Brian" whose screed was definitely a keeper, although nearly everything he wrote was unsuitable for a newspaper.

"From what I can see, there's so many anomalies associated with the whole `event' at Newtown, it's very much unexplained for me," he wrote. "I watched some of the coverage and it sure looked like a TV movie to me, there were so many similarities to what you see on scripted episodic police TV procedurals, it was eerie, now perhaps this is not actually the case which raises even more disturbing implications."

Disturbing implications? This guy makes the intimidating pro-gun chanters who showed up too late at the Capitol on April 3 to affect the big vote look like the Husky cheerleaders, at least if they wore flannel shirts and chain-smoked.